The year 2024 Is getting off  to a fast start for companies consolidating their position in the Conversational Cloud. On January 18, Scottsdale Arizona-based Nextiva announced that it is acquiring Thrio, a Contact Center as a Service specialist that has focussed on simplifying the ways companies move their customer care resources to the cloud. A few days later Genesys announced that it is acquiring Radarr Technologies, a Singapore-based company founded in 2012 to track conversations on social media and extract insights into customer sentiment trends,  brand perception, and other trends that influence a customer’s journey (AKA “Conversational Intelligence”).

No financial terms were made public for either transaction. Both acquiring companies are privately funded heavyweights in the Conversational Cloud domain. Genesys’ $580 million funding round from Salesforce Ventures, along with ServiceNow Ventures and Zoom Video Communications in late 2021, carried a valuation of $21 billion. Nextiva, for its part, is “the largest privately held business communications company in North America powering 100,000+ businesses and billions of conversations every year…..” When it raised $200 million from Goldman Sachs in late 2021, its valuation was a more down to earth $2.7 billion.

Nextiva and Thrio Share a Vision 

The concept of the Conversational Cloud obliterates the distinction between a Contact Center and a company-wide resources for collaboration. Nextiva was founded in 2008 has become a juggernaut in the business communications domain by placing an emphasis on evolving its core product, the Productivity Hub, as an “AI-powered conversational platform”. Thrio, founded ten years later, shares Nextiva’s vision to provide cloud-based resources that simplify a company’s ability to add AI to workflows in order to improve conversations between a companies employees (including contact center agents) and their customers.

Independent of one another, Nextiva and Thrio developed a near identical vision and product description. The vision, as cribbed from the Nextivia Web site, is to support “All conversations in one platform. Empowering agents. Satisfying customers.” Since its founding, Thrio has applied its vast knowledge in cloud-based contact center architecture to define and deploy global infrastructure that fits Nextiva’s vision to a T. It has put an emphasis on creating a robust, reliable and flexible resource that makes it simple for businesses of all sizes to add AI-infused capabilities to their customer service channels. Together they will have the marketing oomph and global scale to deliver on their shared vision.

Genesys Deepens Its Sources of Conversational Intelligence

With its acquisition of Radarr, Genesys is compensating for a blind spot that most of enterprises suffer from in their efforts to support asynchronous, multichannel conversations with customers. Conversations, interactions and transactions over social networks and messaging platforms are now commonplace in many countries. As Genesys CEO Tony Bates acknowledes in a press release, “As consumers increasingly turn to social media platforms to connect with brands for support, these channels become a crucial and largely untapped opportunity for organizations to engage with customers and glean valuable business insights.”

Radarr has refined its ability to monitor posts on social networks with an eye for “mentions” of company names, brands or products. It can detect instances that call for immediate responses from live agents. It can also detect and report on trends in posts that indicate the need for immediate action by marketing or operations. Such services are vital to contact center operators as they try to understand and recognize customer intent across all phases of their buying and support “journey”.

Radarr has built its customer base and its own reputation by monitoring and analyzing activities on a broad array of social networks around the world. It brings new depth of service and geographic reach to the Genesys Cloud.

Echos of Acquisitions Past

There’s been a sea change in the fundamental economics of cloud-computing and consumption-based revenue models, and Opus Research expects to see a lot more consolidation and M&A activity. These two transactions demonstrate the power of consolidation to expand the global reach and technological breadth of Conversational Cloud competitors. Macroeconomic factors (higher interest rates and slower growth) militate toward consolidation in the Conversational Cloud domain. Smaller companies with great ideas and global aspirations are finding brighter futures among larger, better capitalized firms.

Genesys’ acquisition of Radarr has similarities to the acquisition of Digital Roots by Interactions LLP in 2017. Closer to home, it bears a great resemblance to the 2013 acquisition of SoCoCare – a firm founded by a few of the principals of Thrio – by Five9, another leader among CCaaS providers. Both represented efforts to incorporate social media into the conversations supported by multi-channel contact centers. Like Calabria’s acquisition of Wysdom.ai, the goal (better listening) is laudable, success will depend on execution and change management.

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